And Just Like That creator Michael Patrick King has said that he always intended for the series finale to contain “echoes” of Sex and the City’s concluding episode.
*Warning, spoilers for the And Just Like That finale are below*
The Sex and the City spin-off, which launched in 2021, aired its final scenes on Thursday evening, following a surprise announcement two weeks ago that the show was ending after three seasons.
In an interview with Entertainment Weekly, series creator Michael Patrick King explained that the final line delivered by the show’s heroine Carrie Bradshaw (Sarah Jessica Parker) provided “an answer” to her years of grappling with singledom.
In the closing scene, Carrie is seen dancing alone in her luxury duplex to a karaoke version of Barry White’s “You’re The First, The Last, My Everything”.
Parker’s character then concludes her book with the words: “The woman realises she was not alone – she was on her own.” The music switches to the original Sex and the City theme tune as the credits begin to roll.
“It's like an answer, it's a callback, it's an echo,” King explained. “All these years later, she's finally at the place where she sees that that is true. You're not alone, even if you have no one. You're on your own. That's when I knew we were gonna wrap it up.”
King said that while writing the closing scenes, he found himself thinking of the original Sex and the City finale that aired in 2004, particularly the line delivered by Carrie: “The most exciting, challenging, and significant relationship of all is the one you have with yourself.”
King said of the iconic line: “That was the sort of mission statement of Sex and the City. The interesting trick to it is Carrie then answered a phone call from a man who was coming to be with her Mr Big. It was always in my mind, ‘What happens if there's no phone call? How strong of an individual do you have to be to make that same sentence when there's no one on the horizon?’”
When it was announced that And Just Like That was ending abruptly, King said that season three was “a wonderful place to stop”.
Despite reports of declining viewership, King told Entertainment Weekly it was purely “a creative decision”.
“We did everything we wanted to do fully for that expression of the individual versus society,” he said. “Each of the relationships is in a place where you can fan-fiction the rest of it yourselves.”
King recalled telling the show’s star, Parker, about his decision to end the series. “I said to her, ‘I think it's time to stop’. And she said, ‘Then we stop,’” he explained
The finale has received mixed reviews from critics. The Independent’s Adam White wrote that the series “was a total disaster”.
“What a sad, depleting end for the fictional Manhattanites who raised me,” wrote White. “And Just Like That’s final episode was, to little surprise, abominable. It was by turns moronic and confusing, unfunny and hateful, and seemingly edited with a hacksaw – vague approximations of season-long story arcs were brought to abrupt ends, characters did things that made no sense, and Carrie herself re-learnt a lesson she’d already learnt years ago.”
In The Guardian’s two-star review, Hannah J Davies wrote: “And so, the weirdest reboot of them all ended with a whimper, as though the anaesthetic was finally wearing off and we were all collectively coming to. Really, it deserved something bigger, sillier and camper, instead of this sad, heavy-handed farewell.
The Hollywood Reporter’s Robyn Bahr also commented that it ended on a “whimper”, writing: “With exactly nothing going on and precious screen time devoted to frippery like an elite bridal fashion show and obnoxious idiots we will never see again, the concluding episode mirrors And Just Like That itself: frequently pointless, often meandering and bloated with fantasy wealth.”
Variety’s Alison Herman wrote it was “a fittingly bizarre end to a bizarre show”.
“The cumulative feeling given by ‘Party of One’ is not that of a fond farewell. It’s an overpowering, inescapable strangeness – the same strangeness that’s hung over this show from the start, with the gaping absence of Samantha [Kim Catrall] and characters bewildered by the passage of time.”
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